At the end of their terrible year, globalists clung to one small hope: maybe Theresa May and Donald Trump weren’t serious?

The new British Prime Minister had said little about how she would quit the European Union, so perhaps a “soft” Brexit was possible?

In America, the president-elect occasionally tweeted and said things that didn’t sound totally insane to the men and women who frequent the annual gathering of global elites in Davos, Switzerland. Stock markets surged to records, as traders discounted the threat that Trump represented to the global order that Wall Street had exploited so effectively to enrich itself.